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Wednesday, August 1, 2012

#BlogFlash - Day 1 - Thinking about Tara Cove

Today is Day 1 of Terri Long's blog challenge. We are responding to visual prompts each day. Here's the first one: Thinking:

I was thinking about the fun I used to have as a kid. When I was a girl, every summer I was invited to spend a week or two with my cousin. Her family had a chalet at Tara Cove, an Irish sea resort.

Tara Cove

For her and her brothers, the chalet got boring. There was no TV and one radio. Her father expected us to go to the sea and swim three times a day, rain or shine, in order to get his money's worth.

About that - the Irish Sea is COLD. If it hit 70 F it was a balmy summer. We went in, shivering, but after a few minutes we were leaping about as splashing each other as happily as the seals that sometimes joined us.

After the swim we'd run back to the chalet. By that point we were gasping for food. In order to feed such large crews, my aunt set out plain but nourishing meals - sardine sandwiches and oxtail soup were staples. It could have been cardboard and we'd have eaten it.

With no television, we had to improvise games. Monopoly was a staple (the Dublin edition) as well as Authors, but we also played Truth or Consequences and Battleship on endless pieces of paper.

Authors. Looks riotous, does it not?

Sometimes other members of the family would arrive. The kids were banished to a tent outside so the adults could sleep indoors. After swimming three times each day it didn't matter - we could sleep through anything.

We read and read and read, anything we could get our hands on. Once we finished our books we raided my uncle's library; that's how I got introduced to the Ian Fleming books.

Got to love these retro covers!

My uncle followed everyone around with his little cine camera. Once a year he'd have a showing of the films he took - of my cousins crawling around (he always called them "SmellyBot") to my mother performing a dance the day she borrowed my cousin's bikini. Pretty impressive that she could wear a 14 year old girl's suit! That particular movie was one of the faves.

Eat your hearts out, tech geeks!

Eventually we all moved on, went to college. The chalet was sold, and whoever owns it now - will they ever have as much fun as I did?